Taking School Instrumentation One Step Forward: A Do-It-Yourself Type Spectrophotometer and a Jupyter Notebook That Enable Real Time Spectroscopy during School Lessons

A major obstacle that teachers face when they begin their spectroscopy lessons is the lack of a spectrophotometer, mostly due to its relatively high cost. In the present study, the construction of a low-cost do-it-yourself type of instrument is reported. Its construction, as a part of a problem-based scenario, would also help students to enhance their chemical literacy. Moreover, the creation of a Jupyter Notebook called “Spectrophotometry” is also described. With this tool, students and teachers, within a few clicks, will derive absorption and fluorescence spectra and do kinetics studies without any difficulty and the need for time-consuming data postprocessing software. Finally, the views of a group of students on the construction and ease of use of our spectrophotometer are discussed in detail.